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Methane-Trapping Ice May Have Triggered Gulf Spill
sciencehabit writes with an excerpt from Science that begins: "Methane-trapping ice of the kind that has frustrated the first attempt to contain oil gushing offshore of Louisiana may have been a root cause of the blowout that started the spill in the first place, according to [UC Berkeley] professor Robert Bea, who has extensive access to BP p.l.c. documents on the incident. If methane hydrates are eventually implicated, the US oil and gas industry would have to tread even more lightly as it pushes farther and farther offshore in search of energy."
Yeah, so I'm trolling, wanna fight about it? But in all seriousness, this is why I'm against sudden rapid expansions of industry into sensitive environmental areas.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
Since these methane hydrates contain a significant amount of methane (i.e. natural gas), in the years since it was discovered that there are large deposits of them, they've periodically been touted as something we should actively drill for, as e.g. in this 1997 PopSci article.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Depth, pressure.
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Sharks, which tend to stay relatively close to shore, eat the hydrates to power their lasers. This has caused the hydrates to be in relatively low concentration in shallower areas.
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Of course we do. The Gulf is said to leak 2000 barrels a day naturally.
Some natural leaks in the gulf of California are even bigger.
This doesn't really answer why it's not a problem in Alaska, but the temperatures aren't actually much different. Alaskan offshore drilling is in relatively shallow water, which at those latitudes is somewhere in the low single digits C once you get below the ice pack; while this operation in the Gulf was at about 1700 meters depth, where the temperatures are also in the low single digits C. (There's lots of complicating factors, but this graph of depth v. temperature for three different latitudes gives an idea.) There's differences in pressure, which might matter, but also big differences in geology.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Is there a correlation between the amount of methane hydrates and the distance from shore?
The correlation is between distance from shore and depth + temperature.
Here's some nice graphs showing depth vs temperature for methane hydrates
And here's a picture of seafloor depths for context
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o0t!
Uh, dude, look around you. 99.99% of everything you eat, own, use, buy, throw away or want is brought to you by oil. *Nothing* matches it for chemical versatility, nothing else even comes close to the energy density of oil.
It's one of our very few true energy sources. There is also hydro-electricity, nuclear electricity, and coal/gas electricity. Everything else is farts.
You can't run our civilization on electricity alone. All air traffic would immediately and forever stop. Car traffic would essentially disappear. You'll go back to wooden sail ships (how are you gonna mine, refine and transform metal without oil? With coal? Good luck with that, *no one* is gonna want that in their backyard, except poor countries...)
Food production depends on oil for everything. Fertilizers, harvesting, transportation, transformation and your drive to the supermarket. All oil.
Your job, your house in the suburbs, your car? Oil.
You want to know what your kids should learn?
How to raise, breed and ride horses.
This one has more detail, and is actually really-well written. Really, an AP story with some investigative journalism. Kudos, guy, you're making your co-workers look bad. :)
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And, more importantly, why do we want to make drilling off the cost of Florida legal?
I'll tell you why: it's the same reason we aren't all driving electric cars. Because the oil industry, by hook and crook, has done everything it can to make damned sure we're totally dependent on them for our transportation needs, such as buying up all the patents to make sure NIMH and Li-Ion batteries couldn't be used in cars, lobbying hard against ZEV-promoting initiatives, etc. See Who Killed the Electric Car?.
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Hydrates require both high pressure and low temperature to form, along with the proper composition of water and methane. Take away any of the three, and hydrates disappear. Typically the gas/water/oil is warm enough when it reaches the surface that hydrates do not form, and by the time it cools down enough, it has already been processed so that the water and methane are no longer mixed.
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Oil is really valuable, so there's a very high bar for the monetary cost of disaster to be not worth it, on a purely profits-vs-cleanup-costs basis.
Some back-of-the-envelope estimates. Say this disaster ends up costing BP $10 billion. Say that any given rig has a 1% chance of causing a disaster of that magnitude. So we assign a $100 million amortized cost per rig, to cover the "chance this rig will catastrophically blow up". Is it still worth drilling in that case? Well, it actually barely changes the economics at all: these deep-water wells cost about $500-600 million to drill and put into production to begin with. So add to $100m to that and total costs are basically still on the same order of magnitude.
In particular, these rigs can produce a lot of oil. BP's Thunder Horse rig in the gulf produces 250,000 barrels per day. Even if they make only $10/barrel operating profit (probably a low estimate), that's $2.5m per day in profits from the well, i.e. almost a billion dollars per year. Unless fully 10% of such wells incur $10b catastrophic cleanup costs every year, BP comes out ahead.
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"Wacko environmentalists" have absolutely nothing to do with it. The big problem with doing that is, unfortunately, there's precious little oil left close to shore. You could fill the entire U.S. coast so full of wells it looks like a pin cushion and it would hardly make a dent in the oil price. You can see the chart right here, U.S. oil production has been on a steady decline for decades and will never, ever recover, it doesn't matter how many wells you drill. Even the discovery of the north slope of Alaska and building the pipeline never got the U.S. production to recover from its 1972 peak. ANWR? Forget about it, ANWR's a blip that's laughably too little, too late. This is why the Republican chant of "drill baby drill" is so ridiculous, drilling is pointless without oil to find. We've used up most of the oil near shore, which is why BP was drilling in 5000 feet of water, it has nothing to do with environmentalists.
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I worry about permanently assigning blame only once those responsible decide they're going to do nothing (or next to nothing) ala Exxon Valdez. Accidents happen, and unless BP acted in gross negligence, and unless they don't put much effort in to fixing the problem, I won't be worried about permanently affixing their name to it.
But ymmv, I'm not your spiritual leader.
Finally someone who sees the numbers for what they are.
I keep saying that BP laughs all the way to the bank.
What they are doing right now with the dome and booms is just PR stalling. They know full well that drilling the relief is the only way to fix the problem, but the public would go apeshit if they "did nothing" for 3 months. Of course the fact that they are in fact, umm, drilling the relief well is quickly lost on mostly everyone.
The best thing we can do is buy up as much of their stock as we can. That way we can partake in their profits!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Clathrates require enormous pressures and very cold temperatures to remain stable. Warm them up to room temperature... and let's just say your gas tank won't be remaining whole very long.
... if 1) we didn't massively subsidize the use of fossil fuels, and 2) the price of various forms of environmental devastation wasn't treated as an externality. Consider that the continental shelf is the property of the US government, and we have been and continue to lease the mineral rights to BP, et al, for way below market rates. And that we provide massive security services to various oil companies in the form of huge military commitments in the Middle East. And we provide an enormous interstate highway system, the cost of which is only partly offset by user fees such as tolls and gas taxes.
Also, consider that fossil fuel extractors and consumers are essentially paying nothing for the privilege of dumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the atmosphere, even though everyone is paying the cost in the form of climate disturbances, poor air quality, etc. And that when these major spills happen, the companies involved generally get off without paying significant damages (note that after years of litigation, Exxon ended up paying a tiny fraction of the total estimated damages from the Exxon Valdez spill - local fishing and tourism industries were left holding the bag).
Greener alternatives such as wind and solar could compete, if the true costs of fossil fuels were paid at the pump. But they're not.
And what if it turns out that, in fact, BP broke no regulations, bent no rules and this was simply something that nobody could have for-seen and no safety equipment on the planet could have withstood the pressure released from below the earth's surface? Would it be the Mother Nature spill?
Also, I don't think a lot of you appreciate the safety culture in an offshore environment for American companies. Safety is number one. Nobody wants to die on the job, nobody wants their actions to cause somebody else's death and no company wants to tell someody's loved one they died on the job. Safety is a very serious thing offshore - for employees and employers. Following procedures, regulations, safety protocols is paramount to everything else.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
The California seafloor leaks are much larger. I don't think they know exactly how much, but this source quotes "8-80 Exxon Valdez spills", I would guess they mean annually. That's somewhere between 86.4 and 864 million gallons.
They're talking about the total volume of oil residue contained in the down-stream sediments in the seabed, deposited over an unknown period of time. And it seems like they're talking equivalent pre-biodegraded volume, but I'm not sure.
The statement about the rate of seepage was slightly further down:
There is an oil spill everyday at Coal Oil Point (COP), the natural seeps off Santa Barbara, where 20-25 tons of oil have leaked from the seafloor each day for the last several hundred thousand years.
25 tons/day * 7.3 bbl/ton * 42 gal/bbl = 7665 gallons/day.
That's tiny compared to this spill at 200,000 gal/day.
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The good news is that there will be a charity concert in New Orleans, so BP won't have to pay so much money to their victims.
If it ends up like Vladez oil spill BP won't have to pay anything. More than 20 years later the fish have not recovered and the fishermen have not been compensated. Heck, oil still persists, is still found. Large corporations laugh while going to the bank to make another deposit while the people pay.
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Should there be a Law?
I think making them pay the actual total cost of cleanup might be a better solution.
Unfortunately, their liability was limited to $75M under the 1990 Oil Pollution Act. Of course, wanting to close the barn door after the horse has burned it down, the White House now wants to increase that to $10B, a figure slightly more in line with something that would make an oil company slow down and think about how shoddily their operations are being run.
That is all.
I wonder how they've avoided the problems up around Alaska or other places where it's actually cold enough for there to be ice - much less methane trapping ice.
I'm a gas field operator in Alberta, and hydrates can be a massive problem, especially when the wells are not big enough to justify dehydrating the gas at the well site and has to flow to a central facility. Since I operate a sour gas field (contains hydrogen sulfide) the problem is even worse. At our normal field pressures the gas starts to hydrate at around 20 C (68 F) if we are not taking extra steps to control it. It is one of the biggest causes of equipment damage and injuries/deaths. I have never operated oil wells so I am not knowledgeable about how they effect production of oil, but I have read about deaths due to mishandling hydrates at the wellhead of oil wells in Alberta and BC. To reduce the rate that they form, we inject chemicals such as methanol into the gas, and have line heaters at regular intervals along the pipeline. They are a regular problem and danger.
Sadly, BP should hope that things work out for it the way things worked out for ExxonMobile after the catastrophe of the Exxon Valdez.
Exxon had a drunk for a captain who crashed a poorly designed oil tanker causing one of the worst environmental disasters in history. The region's environment still has not recovered two decades later. But ExxonMobile sure has! ExxonMobile is the most profitable company in the world. From 2005-2009 the annual profit for ExxonMobile averaged $36 Billion!
The US Supreme Court was also generous enough a few years ago to reduce the punitive damages award against ExxonMobile for the Valdez from an original jury amount of $5 Billion down to $500 Million (about five days worth of profits).